The Political Scene: Ferguson, Race, and the Criminal-Justice System

“I think it would have been very difficult, maybe even impossible, to get a criminal conviction,” Jeffrey Toobin says of the grand-jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. Toobin, who wrote this week about the prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s “document-dump” approach to the case, joins John Cassidy and host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene to discuss the investigation, and how the issue of race plays out in the criminal-justice system. Of Darren Wilson’s testimony, Cassidy says, “He wasn’t challenged at any point … we don’t know how he would have held up on a witness stand.” They also revisit Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,’s 1995 magazine piece “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,” about the jurors in the O. J. Simpson trial. Toobin says, “The jury system does rely on different people having different perceptions. And that’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing. The problem is when those perceptions are so clearly shaped by race.”​

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